Every day I die eight times over: A haunting interview with MandyAllwood, whose multiple birth ended in tragedy

Nearly every day, Mandy Allwood is reminded of the babies she lost. The number 8 on a front door, rows of Babygros in a shop window and, on rarer occasions, a buggy carrying two or three identical siblings all stir her memories.

At night, the last thing she sees before she switches out the light are the photos of their eight tiny bodies in a picture frame on her bedside table.

This week, however, those frequent flashbacks have flared up even more intensely in perhaps the most poignant - and certainly the most unexpected - way of all.

In the temperate climes of Los Angeles, several thousand miles away from Mandy's modest three-storey home in Warwick, a woman has succeeded where, in 43-year-old Mandy's words, she 'failed' - giving birth to eight apparently healthy babies on Monday.

If they all survive beyond that first crucial week, they will, doctors believe, be the first recorded set to do so. It is a potentially historic milestone, but one that Mandy contemplates with far more visceral feelings than the rest of us.

Just over 12 years ago, in September 1996, she also gave birth to eight babies over the course of an agonising three days, only to watch each of them die within the hour.

Just like the mother in California, she also had six boys and two girls, lending yet more poignancy to the news which she first learned on Tuesday morning over the phone from a friend.

'I hadn't got even the vaguest inkling there was someone out there pregnant with octuplets, so I struggled to take it in at first,' she says. 'But when it did sink in, all those memories flooded back.

Mandy when pregnant with the octuplets in 1996 with boyfriend Paul Hudson: She refused to have any aborted in the hope they would all survive

'It makes me feel like such a failure'

'Thoughts of my babies are never far from the surface; they're around me all the time. But this brings it all back in the most devastating way. When I found out it was six boys and two girls I wept.

'Of course, I'm thrilled for this lady, but it makes me feel like such a failure myself,' she says, breaking into racking sobs. 'I tried so hard to do the right thing, but it was out of my hands, and that's very difficult to live with.

'After everything I went through, I honestly never thought anyone else would manage to have eight healthy babies; that I would ever live to see the day when someone succeeded. It leaves me feeling hugely conflicting emotions.'

Hers, of course, are not the only mixed feelings. Even today, nearly 12-and-a-half years on from the time her situation was made public, Mandy's name is one that seems to inspire everything from reproach to pity.

The former reaction generally comes from those who believe that she was, to an extent, the architect of her own unhappiness.

It is unknown whether the octuplet mother in the U.S. had taken fertility drugs prior to conception - although it is widely assumed she had.

But Mandy, unmarried at the time and in what she later went on to confess was a destructive relationship with the octuplets' father, had played rather fast and loose with fertility enhancing medication.

The drugs had initially been prescribed to her by a private hospital in Birmingham to treat her polycystic ovaries, a condition that can cause infertility.

But after a series of miscarriages, Mandy continued to take the drugs without proper medical supervision - a decision that seems perilously close to recklessness.

The reason is now all too tragically clear: had Mandy been under the care of doctors, she would have been scanned to ensure she had not produced too many eggs.

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Instead, unaware that she had produced so many, she fell pregnant at the start of 1996, quickly discovering that she was carrying not one but eight babies.

'It was a total, total shock,' she says. 'But even then, I immediately had this instinct to fight for them all. I'm sure the woman in America felt exactly the same. You can't not.'

Many in the medical community, however, believed it was unrealistic to expect a successful pregnancy with eight foetuses, and Mandy was referred to multiple birth expert Professor Kypros Nicolaides.

He discussed with her the option of terminating the lives of some of her babies to give her a better chance of carrying the others to full term.

Mandy immediately refused, a decision that some attributed less to altruism than to self-interest, a suspicion that grew when she and the babies' father - who cannot be named for legal reasons - signed a £75,000 deal with a tabloid newspaper for the exclusive rights to her story.

'As each one was born, I thought: "This one will live"

Today, the suggestion still carries a bitter sting. 'I said it at the time and I have said it to anyone who has ever mentioned it since, that I was told there was a chance of them all surviving, and as long as there's a chance then you embrace that hope,' she says.

'That was the only motivation I had. Having the operation would have meant risking the lives of all the babies, as the embryos would have been terminated by me being injected through the stomach.

'Then I would have had to watch them die on the screen in front of me. How do you make that choice? I can only imagine this American mother faced the same choice, and, like me, she refused.'

Mandy knew that she would never carry her babies to full term - at just 12 weeks pregnant, she was the size of a woman with a single baby who was due to give birth.

But she was shocked when, in her 21st week of pregnancy, she went into labour in her bathroom with her first baby, a boy she later named Kypros, after the doctor who had nurtured her thoughout her pregnancy.

'My memory is hazy but I called an ambulance, and I remember lying there, panicking, saying: "Where's my baby?" They told me he was wrapped up - they obviously didn't want to break the news to me that he had already died,' she recalls.

'Perhaps I was naive, but I honestly didn't think he would die.'

On arrival at hospital, however, she had to confront the truth that Kypros had not survived. Over the course of the next three days, her other seven babies, the smallest weighing just 5oz, all succumbed within an hour of their birth.

'I died twice on the operating table and lost a huge amount of blood,' she says. 'I had to have two general anaesthetics in one day. It was a huge trauma for my body but I didn't care, I just wanted the babies to be OK.

'As each one was born, I thought: "This one will live." I was willing it,' she recalls, tears in her eyes once more. 'None of them were stillborn. They all had a chance.'

It wasn't enough, however. Alongside Kypros, her other babies - Adam, Martyn, Cassius, Nelson, Donald, Kitali and Layne - were laid out in tiny Babygros for Mandy to say her goodbyes before, a few days later, they were buried amid the flash of paparazzi bulbs at West Norwood Cemetery, South London.

They have since been moved to another resting place at a secret location which Mandy visits at least once a month, finding 'a kind of peace' from it.

'The octuplets turned my life upside down'

Peace is not, however, a word you would readily associate with Mandy today. By anyone's standards, her life has been on a downward spiral since her time in the worldwide media spotlight, whatever her assertions to the contrary.

Although she went on to have three other children - daughters now aged 11, ten and eight - with the man who fathered the octuplets, her life has dwindled into something of a sorry soap opera filled with what Mandy refers to as 'domestic violence, alcoholism and suicide attempts'.

As she puts it, with what could be said to be dramatic understatement: 'The octuplets turned my life upside down.'

Perhaps she was just plain unlucky. There have, after all, been other successful multiple births in the intervening years.

In November 1997, the world's first surviving septuplets were born, also to an American couple, followed just over a year later by the Chukwu octuplets, delivered in Houston, Texas, of whom seven survived.

Each time, Mandy 'cried for days' on learning the news. The surviving seven Chukwu siblings have just celebrated their tenth birthday.

This year, Mandy's babies would have turned 13, a boisterous teenage milestone she can only try to imagine.

Instead, all she has left is their eight memory boxes, lovingly compiled with their scan pictures, birth certificates and the hundreds of letters she received from the public after their death, including a note from Diana, Princess of Wales, expressing her own sorrow at the news.

'She actually thanked me for keeping her out of the media spotlight for a few months,' Mandy recalls, with a rueful smile.

The memory boxes sit alongside those she has created for her surviving daughters, who divide their time between the homes of their mother and their father, who lives nearby with his new partner.

They know about the loss of their siblings and talk about them openly, encouraged, Mandy says, by herself.

'We don't have secrets - they understand exactly what happened - and we talk about them, which I think is healthy,' she says. 'They say: "We've got brothers and sisters, but they're not with us any more."

'I know they feel upset for me this week because of the new octuplets, but I am trying not to show it to them too much. I just say: "Mum's a bit sad."

'And I have a lot to be thankful for. The other day, one of my daughters said: "Mummy, I love you for who you are," and that made my heart sing. A lot of people have criticised me over the years, but I know I'm a good mother.'

This upbeat approach is in marked contrast to events of recent years, in which Mandy has battled alcoholism, as well as trying to take her own life.

'I realised how lucky I was'

Eighteen months ago, she attempted suicide, washing down sleeping tablets with alcohol in a public toilet.

'Someone found me and called an ambulance. The doctors said I was very lucky: if I had been there any longer I would have died. It was only when I woke up in hospital that I realised how lucky and thankful I was that I'd been found in time. I will never do it again.'

Today, too, she claims to be off the drink, although she continues to be a deeply troubled woman.

Money, for a start, seems to be in short supply, for while she made what was estimated to be in the region of quarter of a million pounds from media interviews at the time of her octuplet pregnancy, the money has long since gone.

Her home is a modest new-build on an estate on the outskirts of Warwick, and while there is talk of new business ideas, one suspects they will come to nothing.

Other plans to write her autobiography, as well as to cooperate with a television series based on her life penned by respected dramatist Lynda La Plante, seem to have fallen by the wayside.

There is some light on the horizon, though. Mandy says she is in a new relationship with a 'wonderful' man who 'looks after me and cares for me'.

She will not, though, get married again, and at 44 there will be no more babies. 'I don't have any plans. I think those days are gone,' she says quietly.

This line in the sand only underlines the curious mixture of sadness and joy she feels for the stranger on the other side of the world to whom she is linked.

When she has gathered herself together a little more, Mandy intends to write the new mother-of-eight a letter explaining her own circumstances. Even better, she would like to meet her some day and cuddle her babies.

'This news has given me a knock, but when I have gathered myself, I'd like to be able to give her and the babies a big hug and a kiss. It would be desperately sad, but maybe a little healing,' says Mandy.

And bittersweet, for a woman who has, in many ways, been defined by her own multiple pregnancy but, some would say, destroyed by it, too.